By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, clearing the way for the mass removal of Japanese Americans from their homes just two months after Pearl Harbor, anti-Asian sentiment had already been woven thoroughly into the national fabric. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the country’s first racially restrictive immigration law; it was followed in 1924 by the Immigration Act, which banned immigrants from all Asian countries. In between these two appalling milestones came the 1913 Alien Land Law, which targeted Asian immigrants by forbidding those foreign nationals who were ineligible for citizenship from owning land in California, where white farmers sought to expel Japanese Americans for “taking” agricultural jobs.

The wartime media understood how the power of written and visual language could be used to depict Japanese Americans as the enemy. One particularly egregious guide, published by Life magazine a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, used portraits of “Chinese public servant” Ong Wen-hao and “Japanese warrior” Tojo Hideki to educate readers on how to distinguish “enemy alien Japs” from “friendly Chinese.” Scribbled annotations contrasted Ong’s “longer, narrower face” and “parchment yellow complexion” with Tojo’s “massive cheek and jawbone” and “earthy” tone. Ong’s and Tojo’s faces gaze out from beneath the heavy web of marks, drawn by an anonymous hand.

Later in 1942, Roosevelt tasked the War Relocation Authority with overseeing the transfer of Japanese Americans to the nation’s 10 incarceration camps. Government officials were instructed to seize family photo albums from detainees’ homes, and prisoners themselves were forbidden from bringing cameras or other recording devices into the camps. A WRA memo stated that the agency’s goals were to “reestablish the evacuated people as a productive segment of the American population” and to “facilitate…reassimilation.” In order to document its presumed success in meeting these objectives, the WRA hired its own photographers to fill in the gaps in the visual record that it had created with images taken under exacting restrictions: No barbed wire or guard towers were to be pictured, and all negatives would be subject to review by the agency’s senior photographers. Stipulations like these sought to ensure that images of Japanese-American incarceration projected the WRA’s efforts as orderly and, above all, humane.

At the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, the exhibit “Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II” features more than 100 photographs documenting the imprisonment of more than 110,000 citizens and legal residents from 1942 to ’45. (The Japanese American Citizens League distinguishes between the word “incarceration” and its euphemism “internment”: “Incarceration….reflects the prison-like conditions faced by Japanese Americans as well as the view that they were treated as if guilty of sabotage, espionage, and/or suspect loyalty.”) The exhibit immediately calls attention to history with its title, which comes from a phrase often attributed to the anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemöller. In one of his postwar lectures, he said, “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Yet the common ground between Niemöller’s statement and the curators’ mission ends where visions of redress begin. Whereas Niemöller, who expressed anti-Semitic views earlier in his career, summons the privileged to speak on behalf of the oppressed, the exhibit encourages all viewers to self-educate and reckon with their own country’s past. Pairing images by photographers like Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams with printed materials ranging from newspaper clippings to detainee records, the exhibit illustrates how the visual legacy of this incarceration is itself a product of historical forces, which continue to influence how Japanese and Asian Americans are perceived today.

ange, best known for her documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, was initially hired to photograph the relocation efforts in California, though it soon became clear that her sympathies were with the detainees rather than the WRA. In 1942, Lange traveled along the West Coast, photographing farmers, store owners, and families in the months leading up to their eviction.

Among the most striking of Lange’s photos on display at the ICP is a portrait of Dave Tatsuno and his father, Shojiro, posed in front of their family’s San Francisco department store on the day before its closure. Smartly dressed, the Tatsunos stand straight-backed next to one another, arms resting by their sides. Only the younger Tatsuno directly faces Lange’s camera, his jutted chin projecting a sense of determination. A handwritten sign in the storefront window behind him announces that the Tatsunos only have “1 DAY to GO.”

Lange’s portrait makes palpable, to devastating effect, the tension between what lay ahead for its subjects and the WRA’s nearly all-white cohort of photographers, hired to sanitize the agency’s efforts. Elena Tajima Creef highlights the “discomfort sometimes evinced” by Lange’s subjects in her 2004 book Imaging Japanese America. Lange’s portrait raises questions about the limits of the photographic documentary genre—of what meaning is communicated and to whom. In Creef’s words, Lange “literally records the violence of the camera as she records the violence of dislocation.” That is, the act of a white outsider intervening to take pictures of such violence is in itself a further exertion of power, one that neither empathy nor a sensitive eye could efface.

One danger of naming any photograph as “documentary” is that the apparatuses of power within which the image is produced—between photographer and subject, Anglo and Asian American—are not necessarily made transparent, and are sometimes even obscured, by the photographic eye. Adams, a landscape photographer, was invited by the director of the Manzanar camp in Central California, a close friend of his, to photograph the camp’s detainees. Like Lange, Adams considered himself sympathetic to the Japanese-American cause. And yet, upon accepting his assignment, he tasked himself with documenting what he perceived as detainees’ loyalty to the United States—a project, Creef notes, that would rely on “whitewashing the signs of racial oppression from the context of the camps.”

The camp conditions that Adams would walk into were dismal. Detainees were crammed into barracks, which were unequipped to shield inhabitants from the dust storms and extreme temperatures in the remote desert. The barracks lacked running water, and detainees were forced to use unpartitioned communal bathroom facilities. The WRA had also failed to establish access to clean drinking water; as E. coli and dysentery broke out in camps across the country, Congress debated whether to implement a mandatory sterilization program for Japanese Americans, or to strip them of their citizenship at the war’s end and deport them to Japan.

In one photograph by Adams, Aya and Henry Tsurutani sit with their son, surrounded by cookware, shelving equipment, and other knickknacks in what looks like it could be a typical midcentury American kitchen. Yet the caption notes that the kitchen was housed inside the camp’s barracks with, as Aya recalled, “cracked wood sealed with tarpaper” and “dust” that “swept into the rooms.” Another photograph depicts women and children gathered on the steps of a small chapel as a white pastor smiles down at them, accented by a tall, stark cross—a picture of paternalistic Anglo-Christian piety to contrast with Shinto, the state religion of Japan, which was banned in the camps, along with the use of the Japanese language at religious ceremonies.

On the same gallery wall at the ICP, six of Adams’s portrait subjects, of varying ages, are depicted donning military or nurses’ uniforms. The collared shirts evoke military men, sweaters and lipstick the dutiful wives at home; some of his subjects smile, as one might do for a formal portrait. Adams’s high-contrast, close-range photographs emphasize the people themselves rather than their conditions and render any visible signs of their incarceration invisible.

On the whole, Adams’s oeuvre suggests that he failed to interrogate what, if anything, was inherently “American” about the visual cues he deployed. Adams photographed his subjects with a visual grammar that drew from popular midcentury depictions of well-to-do (i.e., white) America: nuclear families at home in their kitchens, attending church, or donning the wartime uniform—wholesome, pious, patriotic. The beginnings of William Petersen’s “model minority” myth are alive in Adams’s depictions; indeed, Adams later wrote of how “impressed” he was “with the solidity of [Japanese Americans’] character” and of his inability to “recall one sullen face in Manzanar.”

Adams pursued what he believed to be a progressive mission. Yet his portraits operate within the same racist logic responsible for Japanese-American incarceration in the first place. By focusing on his subjects’ faces and bodies, Adams invites readers to read Japanese Americans, and to attribute interpretations they draw from Adams’s work to the Japanese-American body itself. Adams’s head-on and high-contrast style also homogenizes his Japanese-American subjects, portraying them as, first and foremost, a racialized collective. But the notion of race as an intrinsic and predictive category is a construct, and Japanese Americans were least of all unified in their responses to incarceration.

hen They Came for Me” places the often underrepresented history of outward protest against Japanese-American incarceration on prominent display. A display case at the back of the ICP’s main hall features an original copy of the 1943 “loyalty questionnaire” issued by the WRA, which asked detainees if they would serve in combat and swear unqualified allegiance to the United States by disavowing Japan. Hanging above the questionnaire is a photograph of the high-security Tule Lake Segregation Center, ruled under martial law, where thousands of “no-no boys” were sent after rejecting both propositions.

Despite the existence of accounts by detainees, the work of the WRA’s photographers continues to dominate the visual record of Japanese-American incarceration. The exhibit’s curators have sought to give voice to those who were deliberately silenced by featuring a number of photographs by Toyo Miyatake, a professional photographer who sneaked his camera into Manzanar, as well as recorded video interviews with former detainees by the Seattle-based nonprofit Densho, an archival and educational organization founded by Japanese Americans that has been working to create an archive of these “visual histories.” The exhibit also features several drawings of life in the camps by Miné Okubo, whose illustrations and accompanying writings became Citizen 13660, a keystone autobiographical work of Asian-American literature.

One of Okubo’s ink illustrations depicts a crowded room of people perched on beds, reading, conversing, or simply sitting alone—an intimate scene not visible in any of Lange’s or Adams’s photographs on display. Okubo’s drawings document the conditions to which Japanese Americans were collectively subjected without erasing the variety of individual responses to incarceration. Moreover, the medium of illustration, and perhaps her status as a fellow detainee, gives Okubo’s work a closeness that Lange’s and Adams’s photographs couldn’t have. Okubo’s accompanying writing also pierces the silence of the WRA-commissioned black-and-white photographs: “There was no privacy in our one-room home….We were tired of the shiftless existence and were restless…. Some were ready to risk anything to get away. Others feared to leave the protection of the camp.”

Okubo’s illustrations and paired writings resist binary narratives of Japanese Americans as either loyal or traitorous, victims or heroes, Japanese or American. What is undoubtable in her depictions is the responsibility that the viewer bears in affirming or rejecting those popularly accepted narratives. Okubo’s illustrations, which she began drawing for friends who lived outside of the incarceration camps, often feature one or more figures whose gazes are directed at the viewer, breaking down the viewer’s position as a spectator removed by space and, today, by time.

As the legacy of incarceration continues to touch the present, and as the “stealing our jobs” and “model minority” myths persist, the question of how incarceration under Executive Order 9066 should be remembered is a necessarily political one. The ICP’s exhibit has opened a window on the present to voices from the past, once silenced. We should listen, closely, when they speak.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-barbed-wire-no-guard-towers/What Do the Pyeongchang Games Mean for South Korea?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-do-the-pyeongchang-games-mean-for-south-korea/Madeleine Han,Madeleine HanFeb 23, 2018

The Pyeongchang Olympics are taking place in a very different South Korea than the one that hosted in 1988, but there are echoes in the story lines. Nearly 30 years ago, mass protests had recently pressured military dictator Chun Doo-hwan to allow the country’s first truly democratic elections to go forward. Today, South Korea is emerging after millions of people rallied in the streets against Park Geun-hye, a corrupt right-wing president impeached last year.

In both cases, many activists who initially opposed the Olympics ended up supporting the Games once they took on a new political meaning. In 1988, many believed that the international spotlight that came with the Olympics would help temper the last excesses of a violent regime. Today, progressives as well as the new president, Moon Jae-in, a former human-rights lawyer, are hoping to use the event to revive ties between North and South Korea. While the Trump administration has repeatedly called for amplified military pressure during the Games, Kim Jong-un surprised onlookers by deciding to send North Korean athletes to Pyeongchang to compete alongside their South Korean counterparts. Without a doubt, the Pyeongchang Games have become Moon’s most public venue for enacting his foreign-policy agenda. But the South Korean president’s overtures to the north have not been without controversy on his domestic political turf.

Heejoon Chung, a sports-science professor at Dong-A University, flaggedconcerns about the Pyeongchang Olympics for a decade, cautioning that attentive planning would be needed to mitigate the potentially disastrous financial burden of the Games, especially on Gangwon Province. But with the Olympics nearing their end, Chung revisits the past, present, and future of the Pyeongchang Games and explores what the event reveals about South Korea’s left.

—Madeleine Han

Madeleine Han: Last year, you criticized the Pyeongchang Olympics in a Pressian op-ed for placing undue burdens on the country, citing the extravagant funds needed to build and maintain the venues as well as the event’s shortcomings as a tool to rebuild the nation in the wake of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. Why did you initially oppose the Olympics, and have your feelings about the Games changed?

Heejoon Chung: My initial opposition was because the city of Pyeongchang in Gangwon Province isn’t hosting the Olympics out of love for or expertise in winter sports as much as it is for local development. You can see that from the way the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee for the Olympics opted to build new infrastructure, oftentimes at an unnecessarily large scale, rather than utilize preexisting facilities.

It’s important to remember that Gangwon Province shares a border with North Korea and is Seoul’s source of drinking water, which means it missed out on a great deal of development after the Korean War Armistice was signed. The Olympics are an attempt by the province to close the development gap that had emerged in the intervening decades. But the costs of the Olympics will continue to place a tremendous financial strain on Gangwon Province post-Games, and will be an even greater burden on South Korea’s national coffers. Another problem is that the sports infrastructure that has been built for the Games will not be particularly useful for South Korea after the Olympics.

This is why, a few years ago, I worked with civic groups and other scholars, calling for—not a boycott, but for a smaller-scale event; for the Olympics to be held at multiple locations instead of one. But the entire country became so caught up in the Park Geun-hye incident and the impeachment that it became very difficult to engage in a new discourse about the Olympics. By last year, when the Games were only a year away, it was too late; successfully hosting the Olympics without incident became everyone’s top priority.

As for my position today, although Green Korea United [a South Korean environmentalist group] is still criticizing the Olympics, I changed my stance somewhat; the people of South Korea were left exhausted after the Park impeachment, but the festivities and excitement of the Games will serve as an encouraging, uniting force for our country.

MH: The Olympics are a global tradition. What makes these Pyeongchang Olympics unique from other Games?

HC: Pyeongchang 2018 is significant because, like the 1972 Munich and 1988 Seoul Games, it is being held in a divided nation. Another unusual factor is that we are under the constant threat of war, as you can see from the missile and nuclear tests North Korea undertook not long before the Games. It’s also important to note that Kim Jong-un suddenly changed his tune early this year, expressing North Korean interest in participating in the Olympics and even putting the missile and nuclear tests on hold. These geopolitical circumstances are allowing Pyeongchang 2018 to emphasize the theme of peace. Each of the recent Games have been derided as “the worst” in Olympic history, especially Sochi and Rio. But I think Pyeongchang will be able to avoid that unfortunate moniker, and maybe even go down as one of the better Games.

MH: We’re over a week into the Games now. What do you make of President Moon Jae-in’s engagement of the Olympics as a way to promote his foreign-policy agenda with not only the DPRK but also the United States?

HC: Inter-Korea relations were quite frosty during the nine-year stretch when the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations were in power. The Moon administration, however, is trying to engage in peace-seeking dialogue with North Korea without stepping on the US’s—especially President Trump’s—toes. Dialogue between the nations is progressing smoothly, and particularly notable is the fact that Trump’s belligerent stance is beginning to change. He is slowly growing more open to peaceful dialogue. In addition, Moon Jae-in also advised Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong to engage in talks with the US, showing that US-North Korea dialogue is imperative to lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. From the number of news articles discussing North Korea and the US’s newfound interest in dialogue, President Moon seems to be doing an excellent job of diplomatically engaging with both.

MH: Environmentalists have contested the destruction of sacred Mount Gariwang for the Jeongseon Alpine Center. What has happened to the environmental movement around the Olympics since these protests?

HC: With regard to Mount Gariwang, an environmentalist group called Green Korea United attempted to intervene on multiple occasions. The alpine-slope facility on the mountain is only usable by professional, Olympic-level athletes, which means it can’t be integrated into a tourist resort after the Games. Green Korea United is calling for the mountain to be restored to its original condition after the Games, but complete restoration will be difficult, which means the future state of Mount Gariwang remains to be seen.

MH: The Olympics are less than three weeks long, meaning in any case that the Games are a temporary at best, illusory at worst, solution to North-South tension. Do you see the Olympics influencing inter-Korean relations in the long term? If not, what do you think will be the biggest challenges for progressives going forward, and what would you propose in response?

HC: It’s difficult to say at this point whether the Olympics will have a sizable influence on inter-Korean relations. I think the Moon administration will make good use of the positive political opportunities offered by the Olympic Games and improve South Korea’s relationship with North Korea and the US. The Olympics, in that sense, are serving a catalyst role for accelerating that peace-building process.

MH: With Los Angeles hosting the Olympics in 2028, what advice would you give Americans who are wary about hosting the games?

HC: Many cities, including Los Angeles in 1984, hosted Olympic Games so successfully that they bid again for future events. The International Olympic Committee’s Agenda 2020 three years ago shows that the IOC feels that the Olympics are urgently in need of change. This means that Los Angeles, with its confirmed host-city status, is in a position to negotiate excellent terms for itself—terms that the IOC will realistically have to accept in its current situation. If LA can capitalize on this opportunity, I believe it can create a new Olympic model that improves upon the old one.